I came home one day and heard a mysterious noise near our house that sounded like someone rasping with a metal file. Finally tracked down the source of the noise - one of our resident Douglas squirrels sitting in a big leaf maple tree gnawing on a possum skull. How you might ask, did it come to have a possum skull? Because wildlife biologists (and their wives) do strange things, like bringing home interesting bleached-out bones from an old road kill. We'd set the bones on our back deck the previous week and when they disappeared I thought perhaps a curious raven had carried them off. Turns out that the squirrel, a nursing female, had discovered the bones and was delighted to have a source of calcium to gnaw on. I watched as she worked away on the skull, then, wanting to make sure she didn't lose her precious find, ran up the branch and carefully buried the skull under a loose patch of moss. Now I'm always on the lookout for small bones to bring home and place near the old maple. Call it recycling.

This blog entry is dedicated to my young friends Hunter and Anabel who were so intrigued by this story.

If upon reading the title of this post you were hoping I'd reveal where the dragons Smaug and Fafnir were guarding their hidden hoards of gold, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. Instead, I thought I'd reveal some facets of dragonfly life as exposed (pun intended) by the wonders of digital photography. Though I was dragged kicking and screaming from the film world into the digital world, I've really come to appreciate the advantages of digital photography, among those being the ability to "develop" your own photos using photo software. As I'm enlarging and cropping photos, I'll sometimes find some really interesting detail that I otherwise would have missed. If you looked closely at 2 of the photos from my earlier "Flying Dragons" post, you might have noticed a small, reddish-orange dot in front of the eye. That dot, it turns out, was actually a parasitic water mite [click for link]. In the middle shot above, what looks like a winged ant atop the beetle being eaten by the dragonfly is actually a parasitic wasp that appears to be laying its eggs in the beetle - bad timing as it would turn out. The last photo of the above series shows that even the most intimate details of animal behavior aren't safe from the inquisitive eye of a wildlife biologist/photographer - is it just me or does the dragonfly at the bottom have a smile on its little face?

In my next posting, I'll switch from dragonflies to exploring an interesting connection between a Douglas squirrel and a possum.